Make a Donation

Subscribe to Our Feeds

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.0829 Monday, 18 March 2002
From: Takashi Kozuka <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Sunday, 17 Mar 2002 15:30:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
Copied and pasted from The Independent (16 March 2002)
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=274995
"There's always the devil to pay"
The Faust myth has a dark fascination that has endured for centuries. As
a new London production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus opens, Paul Taylor
explores the modern resonances of a diabolical deal that seems to offer
everything for nothing
16 March 2002
There was quite a queue of young people begging for returns for the
Young Vic's Doctor Faustus (which has its press night on Monday) when I
visited the theatre last week. Could their desperation to see the show
be in any way connected, I wonder, with the fact that the title role is
taken by one Jude Law? The face that launched a million hormones will,
rather fittingly and fetchingly, get to utter the famous line about
Helen of Troy and the "face that launched a thousand ships".
Law, though, has gone just a little bit Greta Garbo on me and has
effectively said no to a mooted meeting with myself and his talented
Mephistopheles, Richard McCabe, at which we were to have discussed
Faustian pacts in art in general, and in this highly charged,
broken-backed and compellingly weird Elizabethan play by Christopher
Marlowe in particular.
Meeting McCabe on his own is a privilege rather than consolation prize,
for he's a big Marlowe buff, having a few years ago for the RSC
impersonated the great free-thinking dramatist, spy, atheist and
all-round irregular guy in a play called The School of Night, named
after a sort of intellectually seditious soir